BMC Remedy API - Display List of Remedy Tickets

[mitchell_mckenz]

What : We are looking to build a custom dashboard in dynatrace that would include a list of recent remedy change request tickets.

How : Remedy has a REST API that can be used to pull a list of recent tickets for a particular account.

Question : Is there a way to do this in dynatrace either with what is already there or can we build a custom plugin that can reach out to the end-point and display the data in the dashboard.

Thank you in advance.

Mitch

[skrystosik]

It’s not good idea but I have to options for you.

First, you can post tickets to Dynatrace via timeseries api as custom metrics. Then you will be able to chart those metrics as top list and see tickets on dashboard. You will have to think a moment on dimensions of such measure. You need title, status and this should give you option for creating such chart. It may be hard to read in general. You can create activegate plugin that will fetch values from API.

Another option I have in mind is using markdown tile. It gives you option to paste html’ish content with links. So I can imagine ActiveGate plugin that will fetch list of top cases, format it and past it to markdown tile on special dashboard via configuration api. It needs some tweaking but should be easier to read. Second option will not consume custom metrics so your only cost would be effort of creating plugin.

Sebastian

[mitchell_mckenz]

"It’s not good idea"

The two options you talked about are not a good idea or is it not a good idea to display a list of recent remedy tickets in a dashboard?

[Mike_L]

There is no logical way to get that data into Dynatrace. By using the configuration API and post custom dashboards it is possible to work around that. It feels a bit like a hack though. Most customers send the Dynatrace problems to a ticketing tool, such as Jira. Is that not an option for you for doing the consolidation?

[mitchell_mckenz]

Thank you for the reply Michael.

"Most customers send the Dynatrace problems to a ticketing tool"

So we're not creating tickets in BCM Remedy or Jira (we're looking at doing this too but that's not the problem I'm trying to solve here) but rather we're trying to provide a list recent changes to aid support engineers to quickly see if something has changed recently which might explain the root cause of the issue they're looking into.

[Mike_L]

What about instead sending the deployment events into Dynatrace (using our API) and allow the AI to automatically flag those as potential root causes to problems?

[Mike_L]

Due to limitations on metric splittings I would not go for option number one. Option number two is possible, but I would do it using a standalone process instead of misusing ActiveGate plugins for it.

[mitchell_mckenz]

"I would do it using a standalone process"

Can you expand on this point please? Is there documentation on this? We definitely do not want a solution that's thrown together and be a burden to maintain and support.

[Mike_L]

We normally write standalone applications in Python, Node.js, Java or Go. The config API is documented from within Dynatrace, I'd recommend to write a dashboard how you want it to look like with the markup tile on there, export it using the API, do changes to it and then re-import it to see how it works.

The idea is that the standalone application would go out and get the tickets from BMC, and call the Dynatrace API to update the dashboard.